To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Culture in the Crossroads

- Transcript
From Wisconsin Public Radio and Public Radio International, a special series East meets West, this hour, Culture in the Crossroads. We had one cinema house in the town I grew up in and it was always perennially for years showing Dr. Shivagar, that was it. Filmmaker Miranayar on the road from the subcontinent of India to the silver screen. This hour, cultural cross -pollination. I had this dual life, you know, on the one hand I was in fact a foreign woman living in Beijing and simultaneously I was playing the Chinese idea of my life on television. An American actress on her role in the hit Chinese soap opera Foreign Babes in Beijing and the cool quotient of Japanese pop culture, also hunting down headbangers in Iraq. We're sitting in a war zone, not in the green zone, we're sitting in the red zone, we hear gunfire everywhere, bombs are going off and we have no story. Kumil Nanjani is a stand -up comedian living in
Chicago but he was born and raised in Pakistan. Nanjani chronicles the culture shock he experienced when he moved to the US in a one -man show called Unpronounceable. More profoundly, the show tells the story of Nanjani's decision to abandon his Islamic faith. Here's a clip. But it didn't kill him. He put his heart back in his chest and he was made pure. But the rest of us remained imperfect. Kumil Nanjani told Steve Paulson how he started questioning his faith by performing an excerpt from his one -man show. Well, we were told that every time you missed a prayer in hell, the punishment was that you would have a mountain thrown at your back. For each missed prayer, one mountain on your back. And I remember as a kid
thinking, why did they say you're back? If it's a mountain, I would kind of fall all over you, right? How big is this mountain? Maybe it's just a hill. Maybe it's just a plateau. I could take a plateau to the back. Plus, what is the method that the mountain is being thrown at you? Is it a guy on top of a mountain, hurling down other mountains, or is he tossing them horizontally across like shot -pert? And if he's strong enough to do that, why isn't he just punching me? That would be pretty hellish punishment. Wouldn't be as poetic though, you know? If you missed a morning prayer, we got a really strong guy to punch you in the back. He's like really strong though. I mean, he could lift up a mountain and throw it at you. In fact, that's what he's doing. He's throwing mountains at your back. We were also told that if you listened to music, you would have molten lead poured into your ears in hell. And my cousin had introduced me to a smooth criminal by Michael Jackson when I was about nine years old. And I
loved that song. And I was secretly listening to it while my parents were away. But I remember hearing about that punishment. I put my head between my feet and I cried, terrified. And then I remember thinking, why lead? Why specifically lead? I would assume hell has enough lava, right? That would hurt. But specifically lead. Maybe Satan got a really good deal on lead a long time ago, like during the heyday of alchemy or something. And he totally overbought. And now he's like, well, we got to move all this lead. If you listen to music, well, pour it in your ears. If you dance, we'll encase you and lead. Now you came to America when you were 18. Go to college. How much of a culture shock was that? Oh, it was a different world. I've been watching American movies my whole life. So I sort of knew what to expect. You know, I knew to expect women dressing differently and a different language, obviously. But little things were
weird. There's a part in my show where I talk about, you know, I never shook hands with a woman until I came to the US. I was 18 years old. The first time I shook hands with a woman, because in Pakistan, it's an Islamic society and men and women aren't supposed to even touch each other. So yeah, I mean, everything was different. It was like an alien planet. Everything felt weird. When did you start to question your religious faith? I'd start taking philosophy classes here and I was learning all these things about debate and critical thinking and all this stuff. I hadn't really been applying these things I was learning to Islam. The first time I really questioned anything in the Quran. I was in a computer lab working on a paper exploring the different ways in which Islam and the West view religion. And I was looking up quotes from the Quran and I found this quote. It said, if your wife doesn't listen to you, you're allowed to beat her lightly. And I thought, that can't be right. Must be a bad translation. So I looked up other translations and each one said the exact same thing. If your wife
doesn't listen to you, you are allowed to beat her lightly. And I knew that was wrong. I knew I knew I knew I knew that was wrong. I knew that God's final word to his people would not give husbands permission to beat their wives, no matter how lightly. And this wasn't something that I could fit in the little room in my brain anymore. This wasn't going to fit in there, you know. I left the computer lab and I walked around. It was two in the morning. And I know it's cliched that my life faltering existential crisis came at two in the morning. But that's just when they happen. I didn't pick the time. If I had picked the time, it would have been like an hour after lunch, you know, when you really energized and ready to tackle an epiphany. But remember, thinking the Quran is an infallible text unchanged and applicable for all time. Well, this sentence was never applicable. If I couldn't trust this sentence in the Quran, could I trust any sentence in the Quran? And I went to bed that night and I felt like I was falling fast. I felt like I was in freefall and I couldn't see what the ground was. Could I trust any sentence in the Quran?
So it was really, it was starting to read the Quran in a new way. I mean, you'd obviously read it all the while you were growing up, but you put on critical lenses for the first time and it meant something different. Exactly. Plus, you know, it was different here, here in the US, there's an emphasis on really questioning things and considering them in a critical way and really thinking about things. Back in Pakistan, we weren't supposed to think about Islam or trying to think of the pretty obvious contradictions that are in there. For instance, in Pakistan, sacrilege is punishable by death. I mean, it's capital punishment and that's in the actual law books, you know, it says, if you say anything against the Quran, you will be put to death. When I read the Quran, it wasn't from a critical perspective at all. It was just, you know, from a, all right, so this is what it says and this is what I must do. So have you totally lost your belief in God? I mean, not just the God of the Quran, but God altogether? Yeah, I really think so. Yeah, I don't believe in
a higher power like that anymore at all. So you would call yourself an atheist now? I think so, yeah, it's kind of a scary word. What are your parents think of this? Oh, they're not big fans of me being atheist. I sent them to DVD and actually I talked to them this morning, they hadn't watched it, they'd heard about the show and I talked to my mom about it today. I think she thought the show was going to be bitter and angry and sort of me railing against Islam, which is really not what the show is like. The show is just my story and part of that is sort of pointing out the contradictions that I think are in the Quran, but she thought that the show was just going to be a tirade against Islam, you know, but it's not. So she really liked the show and she was like, you talk about me well, she liked the show, she said it was funny and then she waited a second, she was like, you really aren't Muslim anymore, are you? So I think it's sort of hard for her. She feels conflicted about it because she sees the show and she realizes that I'm still a moral ethical person that I have strong
values, but at the same time, I'm definitely not Muslim and it's hard for her to make sense of that, I think. You know, one way of interpreting what you've done is this is the classic story of the good Muslim boy who comes to America, comes to the West as exposed to the licentious lifestyle that we have here and loses his faith. I mean, this is what a lot of Muslims worry about. I mean, this is why they see America in all the Western consumer culture symbolizes as a problem. Is it fair to see this as a, I don't know, a dangerous ground for Muslims to come here? Oh, it certainly is dangerous ground, but my parents had thought the same thing the way you described it, you know, falling into the temptations of the West and all of this kind of stuff, individuality and personal freedom and things like that. But what I really wanted to convey with the show was that it wasn't just that, it wasn't
just me being seduced by Western culture. You know, I had critical problems with Islam. I thought that there were inherent things that didn't make sense to me, at least in our world today. So, losing Islam for me wasn't me falling off the light at path or anything, but more me choosing to walk off of it. I'm trying to keep up with you and I don't know if I can do it. Oh, no, I said too much, I haven't said enough. I thought that I heard you laughing. I thought that I heard you
saying. I think I thought I saw you's right. You're listening to the opening music of the Chinese soap opera, Forron Babes in Beijing. When it premiered in the late 90s, it quickly became China's most popular TV show. So, why did 600 million people watch it every day? Well, the show didn't shy away from controversy, and it had lots and lots of sex. American Rachel Duoskin played Jesse, one of the stars of Forron Babes in Beijing. They asked her, how a nice girl from Ann Arbor learned the Chinese for drop trial. You know, I was in Beijing at 22 working for an American company. You know, I met a guy at a party who said, you're white, do you want to be in my friend soap opera? And I said no, because I was working 20 hour days and pushing two
chairs together in the opposite night to sleep and wake up and work again. But the more that my corporate job snaked out hideously on the horizon, the more I thought it would be interesting, at least, to go see the studio with the sky. So eventually, he persuaded me to visit the Beijing Television and Film Studio, and it was an incredibly interesting place. You know, there were guys with long ponytails and white bath robes jumping off of balconies and things. Wow. And I decided it would be a more interesting sat for the rest of my life in Beijing than my fluorescent office would be. So, who were you in Forron Babes in Beijing? I assume you were one of the Forron Babes. Well, you know, it was standard soap opera fair. The show was about two American girls, one played by me and the other played by a German girl. The German girl played the good girl and the American girl? Well, of course. Of course. We were both playing American students, but I'm Brunette, and Brunette's always play the bad girl. Yeah. Just how it works out for us. So that makes you, what, the American Hussie who? The Vixen. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Although interestingly, my character is redeemed in the end of the show, you know, she gets her man and her love is true. She sacrifices everything for true love. Now, of course, this series was done in Chinese. You speak a fairly fluent Chinese, right? I do. I speak fluent Mandarin. And did you act in Mandarin? I did. I don't know if you can call it acting, but I tried very hard to deliver my Mandarin lines. Yeah. When you were doing the show, you say that you spoke in Mandarin, but they wanted you to speak in an American accent. Can you give me some sense of what that's like? I mean, could you say a line in what you think of as good Mandarin and then the way you mush it to make it American? One of my favorite of Jesse's lines was the line, can't you Chinese love anyone other than your wives? She was very direct. And so that line was Chulen, even to Chizu, why? Biaran Wu, so I'ma. And then Chulen, Chizu, why? Biaran Wu, so I'ma. That's wonderful.
It was very cute. Yeah. When foreign babes in Beijing came out, how popular were you? I can only describe it as surreal. People on the street were hysterical with delight, I would say. And they grandmother's padded my head and teenage girls followed me through the markets, buying whatever I bought. And people asked me if it was real love with Tian Ming. Everybody was wildly friendly about it. But you know, there's a sense in China sometimes that you don't have enough space anyway, because it's being crowded. And so being further crowded on the street by fame was breathtaking, I would say. And there was a time when everybody in China knew about foreign babes in Beijing. And it was a very intense experience on the streets. And it was true not only in Beijing, but also in Shanghai and everywhere else I traveled in China. Was there politics involved in this at all? Did either Jesse or Louisa represent any political statement? Well, not overtly, I would say. I mean, I think certainly Jesse and Louisa were themselves symbols of the tempting kinds of products that the West is now offering. China has always used sex as
a metaphor to describe moral encounters with the outside world. There's, of course, the infamous rape of Nanjing. And there's the draining of Chinese men's virility in terms of the opium wars. And so I think sex as a metaphor for moral encounter or for military encounter with the West is a tried and true theme in China. And I think Jesse and Louisa are seducing China in a sense. You know, we come in and we seduce China's best man. These unbelievably gorgeous chiseled Chinese soap opera actors. And in a way, it creates a fantasy that turns the table on Hollywood depictions of Chinese men as, you know, Charlie Tans or inscrutable orientals or Asian houseboys. And the Western women relieve Eastern women momentarily of the chore of being exotic. Is there any chance it will ever be shown in the West? I doubt it, unless by my father who loves it. Rachel DeWaskin's
book about her Chinese soap opera career is called Foreign Babes in Beijing. What do you think about the cross -pollination of popular culture between Eastern and Western cultures? You can send us email through our website at ttbook .org slash East Meets West. Coming up, how do you rock out to heavy metal music in Iraq? They sort of dance around crouching. So they look like they're sitting still, but they're all just sort of arm and arm crouching like some kind of weird Russian heavy metal dance. I'm Jim Fleming. This hour, Culture in the Crossroads is part of the special series East Meets West, brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International. Playing heavy metal in a
Muslim country could present some extra challenges, but one a rocky band is trying to keep their heavy metal dreams alive against the odds. They're called a Krasakouda, which means black scorpion. After the fall of Baghdad, the band struggled to stay together while the country fell into bloody insurgency. In America, Eddie Moretti and Sarush Alvi at Vice Band and formed a friendship with them across the miles. In 2006, Moretti and Alvi set out for Iraq to track the band down. Their journey became the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad. All of a sudden we're sitting in a war zone, not in the green zone. We're sitting in the red zone. We hear gunfire everywhere. Bombs are going off and we have no story. So how
did Eddie Moretti and Sarush Alvi get into Iraq? There is a back door to Iraq. It's called Kurdistan and they have one -way flights from Frankfurt to Erbil, which is in northern Iraq in Kurdistan for some like 600 euros. It's basically no questions asked. No visa required cash only. Cash only flight. So we got on that. You got in and you flew there. Now you knew where you were going? No. We had no idea what Kurdistan was going to be like just to back up for a second. It was a all conjecture. We were told perhaps there's a flight from Frankfurt because it's not listed anywhere. So you just have to go to the airport and go to the kiosk and find out, is there a flight from Frankfurt to Erbil? There was. And the second big variable was, oh, when you land in Erbil, they'll just give you a visa for $50 US stamp your passport and you're in Iraq. That turned out to be false too. In fact, when we landed in Erbil without any contacts or
any idea of what Erbil was going to be like, we had a little bit of problem in the customs area, in the immigration area. I'm sorry. I'm beginning to laugh. You arrived in Iraq without any credentials and you were a little bit of a problem. Without a return ticket as well. And you know, they didn't ask for $50. They stamped something in Arabic into our passports and it wasn't until we were trying to leave that we realized that not only do we not have an exit visa, we don't have an entry visa. And that was the real hard problem was actually trying to leave Iraq. They didn't want to let us leave because we were trying to leave from Baghdad and they're like, who are you guys? How the hell did you get in this country? You know, my experience in Baghdad is what I imagine prison to be like. I've never experienced a level of fear and paranoia so high anywhere where no one trusts anybody. Everyone's watching their back. You know, Baghdad is on lockdown. They have a curfew at nine o 'clock every night. You have to be indoors. So we drive around here in the day, check out carnage and destruction and come back to our hotel. We'd sit on our balcony and we'd smoke cigarettes and
we'd look out into the darkness and we would see flames and the basement bomb going off and Apache helicopters flying right by our hotel and it was an incredibly surreal experience. The nights were hot. It was like somebody was holding a hair dryer to your face at all times. You guys were having an adventure before you even got to the band. How did you find the once you got into Baghdad? Again, just phone calls to their cell phones. In the two years that I had been talking to them, I was known as Mr. X because they didn't want to ever say Eddie Meretti while they're walking the streets of Baghdad just in case someone heard them. So I became Mr. X. So Mr. X called them every step of the way. The thing was that they didn't pick up at any point in our trip there. So when we did arrive in Baghdad, we spent two or three days, maybe even four days before we established contact with the band. Well, we should talk a little bit about the band. I mean, after all, across Akhata, yes, what
this is about. Where did you find them? You hit a couple of days in Baghdad. You hadn't been able to contact them, but you clearly did at some point and they were still there. They were performing. No, they were not performing at all. There were only two remaining members. There was just the bass player for us and the rhythm guitarist Faisal, who were remaining. After a couple of days, we got a call back to our phone from the bass player saying, I'm here, I'll meet. But they didn't really know us and for them to meet with Westerners, it's very risky. For a number of different reasons, if locals got seen working with Westerners, they jeopardize their own lives. So they chose kind of a neutral meeting ground. The Hamra hotel. The Hamra hotel. Which isn't so neutral actually, because it turned out to be infested with like insurgents and spies that were ratting out locals that were dealing with Westerners. So it was kind of a really dangerous place to be. We shouldn't have met there. I'm the fifth day of being in Baghdad, trying to find this band.
We get a call from Faraz, the bass player of the band. Hello, Faraz. Welcome. We're shocked at how he was speaking. Was that a dance? These guys speak perfect English and they say that they learn it by watching American movies. And he agreed to meet us at our hotel. He came with Faisal, who's the lead singer of the band. They are best friends who live 15 minutes away from each other and they haven't seen each other in six months. That's a sign of how bad things are in Baghdad. That people who are really close to each other won't take the risk to see one another for losing their lives and taking unnecessary trips out into the street. What do you think when you look at our window and you see, you know, Baghdad from this perspective does has a change much to look different? I mean, look at it from the top of Baghdad. You would say everything just simple and easy, just a regular life. People walk in cars, goes by and everything just normal. Once you get downstairs and talk to people or just walk with them or whatever, you just like in a dream and then you go to a nightmare. The
problem is you can't wake up, you know what I'm saying? Are you surprised that you made it this far? Are you guys surprised that you're still alive? It's so amazing that we still talk and breathe in and eat in life and sometimes. They really must feel passionately about the music that they're performing to keep at it during all of this. I think it's the thing that keeps them alive. They're living an unimaginable nightmare right now and I've never met people that are so passionate about practicing and playing music with as little chance as they have to actually ever make a career out of it. It's really a way of life for them and all their families and their friends and their and for us is a case of life. They understand that and you know it's what keeps them alive literally. So you found the band in Baghdad and you helped them put on a concert there in Baghdad? Yeah in the summer of
2005. We had planned to go but like we said getting permission and papers and visas proved to be really difficult. So we couldn't actually attend but we had a friend in Baghdad help us organize a concert at Al -Fanar Hotel which is right near the Palestine, the hotel Palestine complex. Johan was our friend in Baghdad and he is a photojournalist I think for New York Times and we tasked him to be a concert promoter for Vice and put on this show. You hadn't turned out how many people showed up. I think there were probably about between 50 and 100 people that showed up in the end and it was really tricky and we were supposed to be at that show filming it
ourselves and in the end we couldn't go because we didn't have visas and didn't have our paperwork sorted and so the band decided that even though we weren't coming the show had to go on that was a big deal. That was a big deal because they told their fans and their friends and their families that they were doing the show and people were going to come and if they cancelled it and all these Iraqi kids showed up to this hotel in the middle of the afternoon and there wasn't a show or an event going on then the band felt that they were putting their fans at risk at risk by congregating in the middle of a war zone. And the Al -Fanar had all kinds of rules like the concert had to start at three or something in the afternoon and be over by six which isn't exactly the best you know pocket for a heavy metal show. It's not prime rock and roll time. It's not rock and roll time and you know they mandated that everyone sit on benches for the whole show which didn't last very long. Not standard. Not a lot. Not standard for a heavy metal show.
But if you see the footage it's kind of cute because they sort of dance around crouching so they look like they're sitting still but they're all just sort of arm and arm crouching like some kind of weird Russian heavy metal dance. Well there is something compelling about that footage because even though there isn't anything you can point a finger at there's still the sense that that here is something that you wouldn't expect to be happening in a war zone. That footage breaks my heart every time I watch it and those people those fans are the unnamed and faceless people that are suffering in this war and when I see them have fun for two hours in the afternoon it just moves me every time I watch it. Eddie Moretti and Sarushalvi talking about their documentary heavy metal and Baghdad parts of which originally aired on VBS TV. Have you heard about this video tape that kills you when you watch it? What kind of tape? A tape.
A regular tape. People run in I don't know. We start to play it and it's like somebody's nightmare. Then suddenly this woman comes on smiling at you right seeing you through the screen and as soon as it's over your phone rings someone knows you've watched it and what they say is you will die in seven days. It's a clip from the Hollywood remake of the Japanese horror movie The Ring. It's just one of many Japanese horror or J horror films that have invaded North America over the last few years. David Calat is the author of J horror the definitive guide to The Ring, The Grudge and Beyond. Calat told Steve Paulson that J horror films have a lot in common. They all seem to revolve in some sort of way around the relationship of parents and children and parenting difficulties. He's going to leave me here. Who?
Daddy. They just want to help you. Not daddy. Your daddy loves you. Daddy loves the horses. He wants me to go away. In fact the author of The Ring books on which the movies of The Ring were based was himself a stay -at -home father who had started off as a father's rights advocate at a parenting advocate. He wrote books about parenting and and lectured in front of the Japanese legislature saying that Japanese fathers needed to be more involved in their children's lives and that the law is needed to adjust to promote that. But it seems like there's a long leap between issues that parents might have and somehow this becoming a staple of horror movies. Oh I disagree. I think that one of the great powers of genre filmmaking whether it's horror or science fiction or other kind of well -defined genres is that you take this outsized imagery and can use it to talk about subjects that sometimes are too
taboo to effectively talk about more openly. Many of these parenting issues are absolutely wrenching when you take in some of the more controversial aspects of the abortion debate or divorce, child abuse, all sorts of things that can be extremely divisive and pull families apart. It's the same kind of concern in this country as it is in Japan and around the world. Families are trying to find what is the best social structure to support children and to make for a better world. These debates can be so intense and so acrimonious that to be able to talk about them sometimes you have to kind of take that remove and you put that in a coded context into what seems to be you know just a pulpy horror film. And audiences can go on that thrill ride and have the cathartic effect of having that story sort of resolved on screen. Well tell me how this might play out in a horror movie. Let's take the ring one of the most famous of the Jay horror movies. How
does parenting figure into that? Well at the risk of spoiling the film for those people who haven't seen it the central ghost character the one who is propagating this this viral curse was herself an abused child abandoned by all those who should have been her advocates left to die in a well murdered by her father and this anger and betrayal that she feels becomes sort of psychically intensified up out of the well where she was killed to express her horror out to others. And ultimately the only way the characters can try to free themselves from her curse is to come to grips with what happened to her to learn about her find out what it was that happened to her what she wants in that way she gets remembered. I think the theme that you can take out of that and so many other Jay horrors of its kind is that the things that happened to children are not just their problem they're the entire society's problem if something goes wrong in a family it affects the entire community. But it almost sounds like this is a story that would come out of folk culture sort of the resonance that a ghost might have for the survivors.
Absolutely and one of the things that the Jay horror films do so wonderfully well is to take these ancient symbols of Asian folklore and bring them up into the modern day. It's a very difficult thing to do a gothic horror story set in the modern world and you find that in this country and in western horror traditions doing things like vampire stories or werewolf stories and setting them in the modern world often just comes off ridiculous and it was the peculiar genius of the Jay horror filmmakers to take these stories that had been circulating in Japanese folk traditions ancient mythological tales and wrench them up into the 21st century and put them side by side with cell phones and VCRs and computers and have that be the way in which the ghosts manifest themselves in the real world. So are there certain kinds of Japanese ghosts in these traditional folk stories? The most common image the one that is the connective tissue of all of these films is a young girl with white dress and flowing black hair combed in front of her face. This
particular image shows up in Japanese folklore and Korean folklore and Chinese folklore but with slightly different shading in Japanese traditions the fact that she had such long hair is the instant recognition that this is a wild woman something out of control whereas in Korean traditions you get pretty much the same imagery but there the white clothing was at the time back when the myths were first sort of minted that was just ordinary clothing and the fact that she had long hair was a sign of beauty. So in the Korean tradition you get the same image but it's less inclined to be instantly recognizable as something other but in all of these Asian traditions one of the distinctions between their ghosts and western ghosts is that Asian ghosts can interact with people and might not be immediately recognized as ghosts. One of the great Japanese ghost story films from the 60s, Quaidan which is an anthology series. One of the stories short stories told in the film is about a man who encounters a ghost later he emerges from the experience meets a woman falls in love with her
marries her has a long happy life with her without realizing she is the same ghost. And this kind of thing comes up in the contemporary J -horrors as well that sometimes the ghosts aren't immediately recognized as dead that they can interact with the world and maybe pass themselves off as human. Do you think the social issues play out the same way in the United States as in Japan? I mean obviously parenting is an issue everywhere but do we have the same anxieties in which leads to the question of whether the movie works the same way on different audiences? Absolutely I think that is definitely one of the reasons that these films suddenly became so extraordinarily popular around the world. I mean you have to take a look at the fact that for generations Japanese films could barely reach Japanese audiences certainly couldn't reach around the world and then all of a sudden in 1998 here's a film that is breaking box office records in every country where it plays.
I think a large part of that is that it tapped into fears that were absolutely universal and so even if the expression of them had this kind of Japanese edge to it in the end it was connecting to something that everybody's going to find frightening. My cultural background doesn't include long haired ghosts and white dresses but I definitely worry about what might happen to my children in a dangerous world or I fear letting them down in some way. That's far more terrifying to me than the idea I might get stabbed to death by a you know a torture adult maniac so that becomes infinitely more haunting and it imbues those images with something that is universal. David Callett is the author of J Horror, The Definitive Guide to the Ring, The Grudge and Beyond. He spoke with Steve Paulson. Do you have a favorite Japanese horror movie?
You can send us email through our website at ttbook .org slash east meets west coming up our fascination with Japanese toys and India born Oscar nominated filmmaker Miranire. This hour culture in the crossroads is part of the special series East meets West brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International. And Alison is a professor and chair of cultural anthropology at Duke University. She's also the author of Millennial Monsters, Japanese toys and the
global imagination. Alison talked to Anne Strangehamps about the universal appeal of Japanese pop culture. Some people call it soft power. There was an American reporter who called this Japan's GNC gross national cool and the word kind of laughable and he didn't mean it to be any more than this has become something that Japan is marketing but not only marketing literally but marketing kind of metaphorically. It's a it's a way of extending Japanese cool around the world that yeah in Japan people buy and large are incredibly proud. I was in Japan when the first Pokemon movie hit here in 1999 and was a huge success and was from page news in Japan. I'm not saying that all Japanese feel oh our national pride depends on entertainment goes like Pokemon but a lot of people do because a lot of Japanese feel that Japanese culture has always been kind of parochial. It's never been able to affect or extend places outside of Japan. So
one person said to me to know that an American cake could go into a 7 -Eleven and buy Pokemon cards in America that feels me with incredible pride. So there is a sense of national pride connected to the globalization of what I call J -Cool. Japanese cool. Why do you think these Japanese fantasy toys Pokemon, Yugi -O, the Tamagachi, the little digital pets? Why do you think those took off so in the United States? What's the appeal to American kids? In part this incredible transformation constantly moving from one world to another from one mode to another also seems fitting with our times. I mean we're at a moment where we all have kind of lives like that for better for worse. You know family split up we move from one town to another town from one state to another state from one country to another country. You know we're very mobile we have attachments and then we detach and have other attachments. I mean the logic of this fantasy is a very fast pace fluctuating morphine fantasy and that is also really in keeping with our times. Could we talk a bit more about that because that's a really intriguing idea that their
Japanese toy makers and dream makers have somehow managed to tap. They've created toys that speak to the global imagination I guess for today's world in a way that western toy makers haven't. Well and again that's my argument I may be wrong but the stuff is really successful so there's got to be a reason other than sheer marketing that it's taking off and which Japan after World War II was in a pretty collapsed state for quite a while for about 15 years. I mean they'd always had because kind of the Buddha's Shinto background. They'd always had a lot of myths and stories and legends and folktales of characters that move from one state to another. A woman that becomes a crane, a frog that becomes a prince. I mean we do too. You don't find that only in Japan but in the years between 1945 and 60 you had Godzilla. You had Astro Boy which was a cartoon of a robot boy very cute but a robot and that these characters and these stories are about morphine. They're about
changing. They're about going from one state to another. Godzilla is a killer but Godzilla is also kind of a cyborg. He was totally changed and mutated by exposure to nuclear reaction by you know testing by the US that's how the story goes and in Japan Godzilla wasn't just evil. I mean people feared Godzilla but they also identified with Godzilla. I mean this was kind of the myth of the media post war age whereas in the US I mean certainly there were a lot of people who were having hard lives but it was an era of I mean that was the era that I was kind of raised and it was the era of father knows best and shows that it was a very stable era. Whereas you get into the late 90s when a lot of these Japanese toys really really took off and the US was things like Pokemon and Yukio and suddenly we're in an era when the US is going through enormous social changes right. And kids are experiencing that. Yeah I mean to be raised in a nice little you know suburban community in the 50s 60s where you have an
intact family again I'm not saying that everyone in America did but that's what got kind of picked up and represented I think in a popular culture. You're right and now you don't see that so much. I mean a lot of people and a lot of kids in their everyday lives have a very different kind of reality things are not a stable they're far less secure the families far less intact there's much more mobility. So my argument is that in Japan you had all of that kind of picked up earlier in part because of very historical you know realities I mean things are really hard in Japan people didn't know whether they would recover they didn't know if the nation would be reconstructed there was an incredible you know challenge to national identity the emperor was said to be not a god he was just a guy I mean that was totally radical so they had to deal with all of these radical things they didn't win the war they thought they were going to but they failed miserably and so in that era you have these kind of fantasy creatures being concocted and constructed and created that have lasted until now and now
I think that we're at a different age and so characters like that stories like that I think are appealing to us too. Ann Ellison is the author of Millennial Monsters Japanese toys and the global imagination she spoke with and strange shims. Miranire is an India -born filmmaker who divides her time between America and the subcontinent. Mississippi masala and monsoon wedding are a couple of her best known films. Her latest is an assimilation tale called the namesake adapted from the novel by a Jumpa Lahiri here's a clip from the film. I've been thinking a lot about my name. Google's fine on my high school diploma but can you mention Google on a resume or a credit card after that? What are your brands saying? I'd like to change my name back to my good name. What is done is done.
Now Google has become your good name. It's too complicated now. It's too old. And anyway you have only yourself to blame. Oh yeah it's my fault because I was four years old. That's right goggles. Anything is possible in America. Do as you wish. The clip from Miranire's new movie The Namesake based on the novel by Jumpa Lahiri. The novel follows the story of two young Indian immigrants in America. Ashok and Ashima Ganguly. As the years go on they have a son whom they name Google in honor of the father's favorite author. In fact he believes that Nikolai Google saved his life when he was a young man, when he was in a train crash etc. And this young boy who's Indian looking but an American through and through is named Gogol Ganguly and has to and then we grow up with Gogol who's played by Kalpen you know as he negotiates his American life and wanting
to be fully American and encounter point to his parents who are really pretty selfless and observing of their son whom they sometimes can't even recognize because he's another creature from them who speak Bengali who are very erudite, very cultured, very sophisticated people but who come from a different world than their Manhattan bound son. So it's a film really about parents and children. It's a film about the seesaw between parents and children and also about the seesaw of people like the gangulys and like millions of us who have left one home for another and who negotiate what it's like to live between worlds. It is for that. That's what the film attempts to be on. How much of this comes from your own experience. Do you have that same kind of cross -cultural background? Did you have to go through the same process of discovery? You know all the answers to these questions Jim and you're just asking me right? I'm encouraging you to expound. Yeah you're just telling me to sing for my supper. Okay I shall proceed.
Well uncannily I have walked almost exactly the same roads as the gangulys in the namesake. I also grew up in East India about 300 miles south of Calcutta in a small town called Bhubaneswar and then spent about 12 summers in Calcutta through my teenage years where I learned to be an actress in fact in Calcutta in political sort of street theatre. Then came applied for a scholarship and somehow got it to come to Cambridge, Massachusetts where I left India for the first time 18 and a half and came to Harvard where I asked if there were any other Indians then they said there were two others and one of them was Suni Tharapurvala who became my best friend and will continue to be in Shalala and she is the wonderful screenwriter with whom I work and who has done a most graceful adaptation of the namesake and we both felt because we both come from her case Bombay, my case you know near Calcutta and lived exactly these sort of between worlds lives that we were born to make this film.
So yes I have a very strong resemblance in terms of the journey of the characters of the namesake to my own journey. It's interesting to me that in some ways your association is more strongly with the parents than with the Sun you had the experience to some extent that they did and then there is the next generation that is least superficially through and through American as you said of the Sun. That must be difficult for you to discover. I love the parent story and I very much wanted to make a adult love story about strangers who fall in love in a distant country. I live also in three generations at home whether it is in Manhattan or in Kampala Uganda my second home my other home my real home and in New Delhi so we live with my son who's 15 and with his grandparents and I just you know have gained so much from that relationship of living with three generations and I very
much want to want to convey in the love story between Ashok and Ashima who very self -effacing people who don't publicly you know proclaim their love who don't touch in public who do not need roses and Valentine's day cards to proclaim their love who sit at a kitchen table and stare at each other over a cup of tea and it speaks volumes of the history they have shared. That's what I wanted to make in the namesake you know with the parents story and I wanted to counterpoint the story with Gogo's American brash growing up where you know fall in love in a second and you know consummate in two seconds and there's no courtesy or etiquette or waiting and but that's just the love aspect but there's also so much so much between you know how we realize as when we are adolescents or when we are young people we think we've invented love we think our parents don't have any clue of what we are experiencing and we also don't think that they may have experienced anything remotely like we are experiencing. Tell me about your film career what's it like
being a woman in what is still to all accounts a man's world? Well as a bulldozer which is what my friends call me sometimes because I just take no I do not take no for an answer if I have an idea so if I as a bulldozer it's a struggle it's a struggle to make independent films but I don't personally allow myself to think that it is more of a struggle being a woman because the key is the struggle is to be inspired you know and if you feel inspiration to follow it and to make it happen and I've been lucky in that I'm pragmatic and I produce my own films and right from the beginning I produce them so when I put my heart on something I've never not got it made so number one if you set out as an independent filmmaker like I have been then you know you have to just find the way for yourself I don't seek to be on a Hollywood A list somewhere you know so what has happened with me is seeing my independent films and I work quite fast
and quickly in many films which also have been successful enough you know when Hollywood comes knocking they come to me for my sensibility on that film it's not like I really seek to be on you know I'm usually doing my own work and when things come to me from the outside they have to grab me in a in the same visceral way as my own ideas do you know do you think that it is do you think that your film career would have taken could have taken the same shape if you had stayed in India well number one I discovered film as a medium for me only in this country and I very very grateful and blessed for that because I discovered film as an undergraduate at Harvard when I was twenty twenty one I really hadn't grown up in a climate of film we had one cinema house in the town I grew up in and it was always perennially for years showing Dr. Shivago so it was that was it so you know I even saw my first Satajith Rae films in Cambridge you know it was amazing at the age twenty one
so number one I discovered film here and the great gift of being first at Cambridge and then in New York City is I felt that we were given this kind of foolish confidence as I call it to believe that we can do anything that anything is possible if you want to make a film by the time you're twenty one twenty two you can do it and it's that kind of thing that happens actually it's a very American thing that you can do anything that type of belief or whatever confidence that you don't have to pay your dues for ten or twenty years which is the style it was when I was growing up in India it's much more closer to the British style where you really believe you have to be you know at the bottom of the pit heap for many many years before you can even dare to raise your head to dream you know you did say that you did some acting in India so you yes I did acting but filmmaking is a different thing and directing a film is like being the general of a creative army you know and it's not something anyway in India we were given the the confidence to believe we could you know get
freedom for our country and run the country with Indira Gandhi and so on that the models were everywhere but I'm answering your question specifically in the sense that filmmaking came to me when I was in this country and I feel very happy about that because you know it also came at a when I was young and you need that gargantuan energy to believe in yourself and to struggle against all odds and to make these bloody movies one after the other Miranayar is an Oscar nominated film director the namesake is her latest film I'm Jim Fleming this hour culture in the crossroads is part of the special series East meets West the series was produced by to the best of our knowledge at the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio for more information on to the best of our knowledge or this series please go to our website at www .ttbook .org slash East meets West PRI Public
Radio International
- Series
- To The Best Of Our Knowledge
- Episode
- Culture in the Crossroads
- Producing Organization
- Wisconsin Public Radio
- Contributing Organization
- Wisconsin Public Radio (Madison, Wisconsin)
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip-2c34476f7a0
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip-2c34476f7a0).
- Description
- Episode Description
- East Meets West Part Four Imagine growing up in Pakistan. Islam is a way of life. You get up every morning at 4:30 to pray. Then when you're 18, you move to the American Midwest, Iowa, to attend college. That's the story Kumail Nanjiani tells in his one-man show, "Unpronounceable." Also, India-born, Oscar-nominated film-maker Mira Nair.
- Episode Description
- This record is part of the Politics and History section of the To The Best of Our Knowledge special collection.
- Episode Description
- This record is part of the Arts and Culture section of the To The Best of Our Knowledge special collection.
- Series Description
- ”To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a Peabody award-winning national public radio show that explores big ideas and beautiful questions. Deep interviews with philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, historians, and others help listeners find new sources of meaning, purpose, and wonder in daily life. Whether it’s about bees, poetry, skin, or psychedelics, every episode is an intimate, sound-rich journey into open-minded, open-hearted conversations. Warm and engaging, TTBOOK helps listeners feel less alone and more connected – to our common humanity and to the world we share. Each hour has a theme that is explored over the course of the hour, primarily through interviews, although the show also airs commentaries, performance pieces, and occasional reporter pieces. Topics vary widely, from contemporary politics, science, and "big ideas", to pop culture themes such as "Nerds" or "Apocalyptic Fiction".
- Created Date
- 2008-08-17
- Asset type
- Episode
- Media type
- Sound
- Duration
- 00:53:03.046
- Credits
-
-
Producing Organization: Wisconsin Public Radio
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
-
Wisconsin Public Radio
Identifier: cpb-aacip-05e5cf2907a (Filename)
Format: Zip drive
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
- Citations
- Chicago: “To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Culture in the Crossroads,” 2008-08-17, Wisconsin Public Radio, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed August 23, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-2c34476f7a0.
- MLA: “To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Culture in the Crossroads.” 2008-08-17. Wisconsin Public Radio, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. August 23, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-2c34476f7a0>.
- APA: To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Culture in the Crossroads. Boston, MA: Wisconsin Public Radio, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-2c34476f7a0